How to Build a Boring Business (that makes expansion feel safe + doable)

Does your business feel a bit noisy and complicated, with a collection of loosely related offers you’re constantly trying to market?

Or maybe you're feeling overwhelmed by all the things you could be doing, so you aren’t doing very much at all?

Perhaps you’re longing for a business that feels simpler, but there's also a lot of resistance to this - the spacious business we say we want can feel surprisingly unsafe...

In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of my very boring business (nb: this has been years in the making: let's massively shortcut this for you!).

We are talking about the structure, the seasons and the self-belief involved in building your client-centred offer ecosystem that supports your people, your preferences, and the practice you are dreaming of.

FREE TO YOU:

🌼 Beyond the Story is my free masterclass all about how to coach at the level where lasting change becomes possible. [Sign up here and come along!]

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Website: www.saspetherick.com | Instagram:  @saspetherick

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to Courage and Fife Coaches. When you build your self-belief and your business at under 30 minutes a week, I'm Seth Eterek, your host. I'm a coach, supervisor, and unapologetic self-belief nerd. My mission is simple. I want your coaching practice to feel like a right fucking bitch. Let's go. Hello you. I wanted to take you behind the scenes of my own business today. Um because I had this huge realization last week, I was writing my newsletter, which I've now got this real energy for. I think because I've let go of trying to have some kind of structure to it, and now it's just like me and you chatting, and it's so much more fun to write, and I get loads more replies. It's really cool. So I was writing my newsletter last week, and the topic that I came up with was around how I'm moving out of a season of marketing ripen all the time and moving into the launch for SVCA, the coaching certification that I have. And I had this realization that oh, the thing that makes all of this possible and feel really spacious and safe to expand into is that my business is actually really bloody boring. And I wanted to talk to you about why I think that is so great and how it has, you know, allowed for this expansion. Especially if, like me, you tend to be a bit of a you know, overfunctioner, high achiever, that kind of vibe where you're actually happier doing. I think this can feel really unsafe, right? To actually have something that's a bit boring. And if you are a bit more of an underfunctioner where maybe you just get overwhelmed by all the things and you don't end up doing much at all, then I think a boring business can actually be a real gift to you as well. So I think most of us look at the highlight reels that we see out there. You know, everyone's marketing, everyone's planning the next offer and delivering mind-blowing client sessions and building up their kind of slick AI-infused back ends. I mean, ugh, yapping on social media several times a week, all of that, it makes all of us, me included, feel like we're behind all the time. It's bloody exhausting to think about, especially in this weather. And what I've realized is as I'm planning out this launch over the next couple of months, what I love is how much more spacious and doable it all feels. Like I'm heading into this big ass launch, and it feels simple and boring. And this is not witchcraft, and it hasn't happened accidentally. Like it honestly, it's taken a shit ton of intention, a concerted and imperfect effort for me to get really organized. A lot of letting go of my interpreting overworking as value-giving. Um like most of you, I'm pretty naturally good at having ideas. I really enjoy creating things. I love this work, right? So I can easily, very easily actually turn that enthusiasm and generosity into far too much work. So this kind of simplicity has required way more intention from me than having a complex business ever did. And, you know, this has come up in our ripen group call this week as well, where we started talking about our routines over the summer and how folks are finding it a little bit tricky to kind of, you know, get stuff done while the weather is really hot and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, apart from just letting go of the idea that we should all be super productive in the middle of a climate catastrophe, I think we need to look at that. But we were just talking about what is underneath some of that behaviour as well, which is that creating a bit of a simple, boring business can feel quite difficult. So we were talking about, you know, wanting more consistent working weeks, kind of predictable kinds of work on particular days, containing client work so it's not sort of spread out through the week, having clearer boundaries, building in genuine time off. And underneath this quite kind of practical conversation about what's the best planner to buy because that will solve all things. We started talking about the edge of expansion. And you know, one coach talked about wanting a really spacious business where she's only working three days a week, and then she said, Well, but what if that actually works? Like, what if I could make the money I want to make and it all goes really well, and it is simple and boring. Like, who am I then? And I think this is some of the like hidden stuff that we don't sometimes talk about, the tension between our desires and our fears, or the risks that those desires bring up for us, especially if our worth does get a bit tangled up with working hard and being needed. Like spaciousness doesn't necessarily feel that spacious at the start, right? It can feel quite disorienting. Another coach was talking about how you know she realized that her nervous system had become really familiar with instability, and yet she could see like people who are pretty good at building businesses or managing money or eating well, exercising consistently, often do some fairly boring things repeatedly. I can attest to this as someone who's become a bit of a gym rat very late in life. And if instability has become familiar, stability can actually feel weirdly unsafe. Like we know who we are when we're responding to chaos. Like, I am so the gal to call if you're in some kind of emergency. Like, I am like so there. Most of us who are overfunctioners, we didn't become that way by accident. Like we got really familiar with chaos, with needing to be the grown-up quite young, often, right? Not as a general rule, but there's usually some stuff in there around that. So we know how to kind of rescue the day and squeeze something in and stay up late, pull something out of the bag at the last minute. And we often have received a lot of praise for being that person. So just showing up, doing the work, and then going off to live your life can feel just outrageous. Like that is not possible, right? And for that reason, I think we resist and often outrightly rebel against routine. Routine can feel boring, constrictive. And actually, I think routine is not the opposite of freedom. I think it actually protects your freedom from being swallowed up by the overfunctioning, by the work. If we don't, I know this is so true for me. If I don't have some kind of structure, my work tends to spread across every available surface, and I just feel like I've got too many tabs open. So, you know, I I'll be checking emails in bed, you know, before I've even properly started my day. Um the thing that I haven't done just keeps following me around all weekend. I technically have time off, but I'm not quite off, you know. And so this is often where boundaries alongside routine can be the secret source, right? It's it and I think boundaries are often something we interpret as what we communicate to other people. It's like this is when I'm available, this is what's included in an offer, this is how quickly I'll respond. But I think the real boundaries, the ones that are a bit edgy, are often the agreements or the promises that we make to ourselves about how much of our work life gets to occupy our entire world. So we were talking about on the Ripen Core about routine would actually help her free up the rest of her day. And I think that's the bit, right? It's it's not about making life smaller, it's actually about making expansion safer. And then, of course, what happens is we set up a routine, and then our little perfectionist goes, Well, Thursday's gone rogue, so I guess that part of my life where I had a routine is over now, right? Because we decide that the perfect working week has to be the same all the time. And I think that that isn't routine, that's rigidity. That doesn't make expansion safer. It feels like you're failing at it, right? So all of this comes down to some all or nothing thinking, right? That we can that gets quite sophisticated and we can get a bit caught up in. And so, what if you recognize yourself in this, right? I love some routine, I would love a bit more boredom, I want things to be a bit more predictable because that actually makes my nervous system relax a bit. I would say instead of getting into that perfect working week trap, play with this question. Like, what are you willing to experiment with? Right? Like a new boundary could be an experiment. Not opening your inbox until after lunch can be an experiment. Keeping one day free from all appointments can be an experiment. It gives us a little root out of all or nothing thinking. It's like I'm curious to see what happens, right? When we're experimenting, we're not trying to make something happen, we're trying something new to see what happens, right? And you know, don't fall into the idea that I'm choosing a routine and that has to stay the same for the rest of my life, right? All we're doing is trying something new, noticing what happens and adjusting as we go. And all of this brings me back to the kind of structure of my business, which is quite boring. As someone who was effectively running two businesses, like I was supporting coaches and supporting muggles, and I had quite substantive offers for both, and it just always felt like I was marketing to the wrong person and trying to do two things at once. Now I have the boring business where my business is just this ecosystem that's made up of three rooms, and each room serves a different purpose, and this is the important bit, they have connecting doors, right? And this is where I think you start to see how setting up an ecosystem of client-centered offers really starts to work for you. So let me give you my example and then you we can kind of look at you can look at how that might work for you. So the first room is the coaching well, right? That's my most accessible offer. It's kind of a real low lift for me. It is monthly reflective supervision. It's a space where thoughtful coaches bring all their wins and what the fucks and the ethical tangles and the conversations they're still thinking about three days later, and where they're getting in their own way around building a business, what feels unsure, what they want to celebrate with other coaches, like be witnessed in, seek guidance around, right? This room supports coaches to get more confident, do excellent ethical client work without having to hold all of it alone. It's like it's a gift, right? To walk into a space where for 90 minutes you're held, you don't have to do anything, you just rock on up. I've already thought about a reflective theme and we play with it. You meet other coaches, it's aces. That space is like glorious to me, and it's like $50 US a month. Why wouldn't you? Anyway, this is not a pitch, by the way. I just wanted to share. The thing about the coaching well is everybody needs supervision, right? So my other members of my other two rooms, Ripen and SVCA, they get the coaching well thrown in, right? So there's a connecting door between those two offers. Ripen is, as you probably know by now, if you've been listening in, it's a year-long mentor mentoring partnership for coaches who are building their practice. So this is where we work on the business around coaching, how to develop client-centered offers, messaging that makes your people think, oh, this is for me, marketing and selling, without feeling like you're, you know, a goblin down the full-time content mines, all of that stuff, building a bit more of a generous, sustainable rhythm for your work and making money without constructing you know offers that you really don't love. It's also where we have conversations about routines and boundaries and self-belief and visibility and what success looks actually looks like, right? So that's where I can, and then the third room is the self-belief coaching academy, which is my certification program for coaches who want to move beyond like tools and become really more discerning about what's actually happening beneath the client story, like where we explore the root causes of self-doubt, we get to the real deep layers of change and transformation, identity, protective patterns, meaning making it's lush, and and it's all come from my master's degree, which was about the psychology of coaching, and my dissertation, which was about the experience of self-doubt. So, you know, it's that translated for actual practice. And so they're my three offers, and there are connecting doors, right? Ripen and SBCA coaches get the coaching well thrown in. Coaches who want to dip their toes into supervision with me may later decide, and many have that they want more support with their business through Ripen or want to deepen their craft through SBCA. And there's no weird upsell in involved here, right? They're different rooms inside the same body of work. And so that's, I think, such a useful question for you as a coach, perhaps building out a bit of an ecosystem, is do your offers belong together? Right? Are is there a kind of coherent thread that runs through everything you have that's available for your people? So it's not about like how do I create a clever funnel that leads one person to that thing? Um, it's more and it's also not how do I move everyone towards the most expensive thing, right? That kind of progressive upsell ladder, which always felt to me like a bit of a con job. It's more like, are these offers expressions of the work that I most want to do? Are they distinct? Like, do they solve quite specific but connected challenges for my ideal client? Is it really clear to clients which room is right for them at each stage of their journey? Does this ecosystem support their development without making them buy the same thing repeatedly in different packaging, right? So this ecosystem also creates real containment for me. Like now I'm not having every good idea and going, right, that's a new offer, right? It's actually, does this idea belong in one of the rooms I've already built? Most of the time it kind of does because I just love kind of diving deep into stuff. But I've created a container that allows me to have those ideas and new kind of expressions of the work or stuff that I get excited about, you know, I'm able to bring that into a specific room. So the other thing that I think about a lot around a boring business, not just the structure of the ecosystem, but the seasonality of it, right? So I'm not um marketing all three rooms at once, like my year has seasons. So most of the time you'll find me banging on about ripen. That's primarily what this podcast is all about. And for a concentrated period of the year, I'm gonna focus almost entirely on SBCA for this launch that's coming up. And the coaching whale kind of ticks along. Honestly, I'm still figuring out exactly how to market the coaching whale, by the way. Like I'm not pretending I've I know the answers at all. This is a bit of live for me. I'm still learning about it. I'm actually really excited to be working specifically on my messaging around my office with a genius coach who I might just bring in for a guest conversation. We've got our first session next week, so I'll keep I'll keep you in the loop on that. But I guess the thing that I really want to kind of leave you with is that expansion doesn't mean everything becoming bigger and louder at once, and it doesn't mean that you kind of dilute all your knowledge into a shitload of different offers. I think as well, you we don't want to ask either of ourselves or our audiences, our potential clients to pay attention to everything simultaneously, right? I think expansion comes from giving uh a part of our work our full attention as everything else remains steady. And consistency kind of lowers the emotional stakes, right? I if I'm only telling people about one offer once, that one invitation has to work, right? Otherwise, self-doubt starts playing whack-a-mole, right? Like, should I discount it or have I chosen the wrong thing? Or does anybody want this? Should I bin everything and create something new? Right, but when marketing becomes a bit more consistent, it's an ongoing conversation. No single email or post or podcast episode or launch has to carry the entire business, and your body of work gets time to mature. People get time to encounter it and understand where you're coming from, and they build trust with you, right? So, all of this is to say, I think matching our business growth to our true capacity, right? I think there's something really beautiful about expanding at the pace of your nervous system or your capacity to hold it is so spacious and fun to me. So this is all about matching my business to my true capacity rather than the imagined capacity I think I should have because Instagram, right? So I love looking at my calendar and knowing that I have a slow morning walking Bodie, getting my lifts in, you know, getting to the gym. I have a couple of client session dedicated days each week. I have entire days where nothing is booked in, right? And that gives me space for overflow, for thinking, writing, unexpected stuff, you know, or sometimes doing absolutely nothing. Go jump in the lake, literally. I have breathing room. And I think the the thing that has made me feel like this is really sustainable is that I'm not seeing space as something I need to fill, right? It does feel like I have locked some new level of healthy adulthood, right? The capacity doesn't mean capacity for more work, right? Sometimes it's just about, you know, thinking a bit more deeply or going and reading a book, having room for a life that sits around work. You know, this is this is amazing to me. And look, none of this means I've solved every tension, like it's still a monkey puzzle to figure out the enughness of it all. Like I think I'm in this kind of perennial conversation with myself about how do I create the revenue that I want without diluting the depth and the intimacy and the personal attention that is my joy, and without pricing out the coaches that I most want to serve. Like, I really want my work to be available to you because you're who I want to work with, right? If we keep going on this never-ending upsell ladder, like we end up charging ridiculous amounts of money, and the kinds of people that can afford that aren't necessarily the folks that you really love working with, you know. Um, and I want to do all of this without slipping back into that overwork or without making the business really dependent on me being hyper available. So these are real tensions. I don't think they disappear because we design a good weekly rhythm, but I b really believe that businesses don't just need to make financial sense. Really need to make nervous system sense. And something might be profitable on paper and still require you to work in a way that leaves you permanently braced. An offer might sell and still ask you to give so much more than you can sustainably provide. Right? A launch strategy may be super effective and still make you crawl under, make you want to crawl under the duvet for weeks afterwards. Like none of that feels great to me, you know. And and I have done all of those things, by the way, like it's it's from hard lessons. So this is the thing simple and boring allows me to do my best work, it gives me a really lovely, sturdy place to stand, and having those incremental business expansion moments alongside it, you know. So I what does this mean about you and your coaching ecosystem? I think look, if you want to make your business super boring and doable, right? If your business is feeling a bit noisy and complicated or weirdly quiet because overwhelm has you hiding, like I don't think the answer for any of us is to get better at spinning the plates. I think it really is about stepping back and saying, what's the body of work I'm actually building? What am I called to build? What does each of my offers do? You know, what's the problem itself? What is it, what are my clients signing up for? Why would they pay for this and not just keep their money? We really have to ask ourselves these questions. And when we think more broadly about our business as a whole, do our offers have connecting doors or are they just a collection of slightly related ideas, but there's no real coherence there that a client can go, you're the coach for me. And you know, what rhythm would fit my real life, my real capacity? What am I creating? Because staying with the main thing feels risky, right? I know so many coaches are tempted to dilute their main offer because they don't quite believe that it's going to sell. And look, what might become possible if you actually built a client-centered ecosystem that works for you, right? Like this is this is what we do in Ripen. It's the conversation I'm having with coaches every day. We are not in any way manufacturing identical businesses, right? Like, this is very tailored bespoke work. We look at you, your clients, your body of work, what you actually want to create, the capacity that you have, and the way you do your best work. Um, and look, because my business has seasons, I've got space for just two more coaches. I had three to four, but two of those spaces have gone this week. I've got space for I'm that sounded like a pitch, didn't it? I don't mean for that to sound like that. I just want to be really transparent about the space I have. So I have space for two more coaches in Ripen before I'm turning my attention fully to SBCA. Um, probably until much later in the year, sort of November time. So if you are looking for a bit of a nudge to kind of go, you know what, I am gonna take my work seriously, then please do fill out the very short application in the show notes. It's just a few questions that tell me a bit more about you and your coaching. You'll be able to book a chat with me. We'll get on there, have a chat, see what's going on for you, and see if Ripen is right for you right now. Um, and we will be moving into the SBCA room here on the podcast, right? So I've got one more episode coming up, which is all about behind the scenes of a really fun launch, and then we're gonna move into some episodes where we're gonna be exploring more about the craft of coaching, like what happens when you reach the edge of your initial coach training, like why insight doesn't always create change, and why that might be quite frustrating for you and your client, what it means to listen beyond the story a client is telling, and what self-belief really has to do with becoming an excellent coach, right? So I'm I'm super excited to share more about this. If you are interested in just a free way to explore some of these things around the craft of your coaching, I've also got a link in the show notes to Beyond the Story, which is a free workshop I've got coming up. It's on the 1st of September. You can just sign up and then bung it in your calendar, and we'll meet up uh on the first of September to I want to give you like a kind of experience of what it's like to coach with an SBCA lens. Um, it's it's gonna be really fun. I'm super excited about it. So I hope this has been helpful just to kind of see what's going on behind the scenes of a pretty established practice, all to say. Like I've been at this for quite a while, and my greatest joy is helping you get to a place where you are as buzzed and excited to share your offers with your clients as I am with you. So um, I hope this is helpful. I would recommend tuning in for next week's episode. We're gonna be meeting with one of the ripen coaches who has taken an idea that she's been sitting with for seven years and turned it into a group offer, and she is now getting people signing up, and it is the most fun to be a part of. So we'll take you behind the scenes of that launch, which um, for a lot of us, I think launch is a really tricky business, right? So do do come and join us next week. And I really hope that you are listening to this in the park or at the beach or on a morning walk, and you are getting some lovely summer rest. Or if you're down under, you are bundled up with a hot drink and feeling nice and cozy. I will see you next time.